USER ROLES IN THE ONLINE MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT DOMAIN
Since the diffusion and domestication of computers and the internet, users have taken up different roles besides being consumers. As central players in the value chain, they started creating, producing, publishing, distributing and communicating. Roles that were reserved for business parties were taken over by users. Traditional and one-way producer-consumer relations were challenged and started shifting into active user-producer relations. The developments were at first particularly visible in practice in the media and entertainment domain and have often been labelled disruptive. Many traditional incumbents have acted on the defensive. But more and more, businesses try to incorporate these changed user roles in their services.
This PhD thesis is an exploratory study concerning current online user roles and the shifting relationship between users (people at home using the internet for media and entertainment purposes in their leisure time) and producers (the facilitators of these media and entertainment services). As a field of research, this study focuses on the media and entertainment domain. Point of departure for this study is the observation that users have been enabled by computers and the internet to take on significantly important roles in the value creation process. This development is problematic for traditional user-producer relationships. The problems are particularly visible looking at the current struggle of many traditional incumbents in the media and entertainment domain in rethinking their organizational model and their place in the field. But also in scholarly literature, user roles in practice point to a gap in discourse about user roles and user-producer relations. This thesis tries to give insight into the developments and take one step further in understanding changing user roles in our current computer mediated environment by answering the following question:
To what extent have user roles and traditional user-producer relations changed in the online media and entertainment domain since the 1980s?
The main research question is worked out into five sub questions, each demarcating one part of the study:
- How can traditional user and producer roles in the traditional media and entertainment domain be characterized?
- How have user and producer roles shifted in the media and entertainment domain since the domestication of computers and the internet?
- How can these changes be embedded into existing scholarly literature about users and user-producer relations?
- What current user and producer roles do online media and entertainment services enable?
- What roles do users actually take on in the online media and entertainment domain?
